McGeough’s Curious Lack of Curiosity

Fairfax's star correspondent shares with his readers the shocking news that 35 mental health practitioners believe Donald Trump is a loony and unfit to occupy the White House. Don't you think he should also have noted that two-thirds are ardent Democratic Party contributors and partisans?

In The Australian today, columnist Mark Day (paywalled) notes in passing that Fairfax Media’s US correspondent, Paul McGeough, contributes a steady stream of copy from Washington that “reads like a personal vendetta against Donald Trump.” It is a timely observation as McGeough was at it again this very morning, passing along to remaining readers of the Age and Sydney Morning Herald the view of 35 psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors and social workers who have diagnosed Trump as a loony unfit to occupy the White House.

Well guess what — Surprise! Surprise! — of the head-shrinking 35, roughly two-thirds are generous and frequent financial supporters of Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton in particular.

Of the signatories only one — yes, just one — has donated to a Republican, but his money went to Senator John McCain, who detests Trump with a vehemence that even Hillary Clinton might find hard to match.

Below, the full list of signatories with the recipients of their largesse listed beneath each name. Quadrant Online readers might care to click on their names and view the details of their various and many donations.

Oh, and there is one other item of easily found background information that McGeough might have laid before his short-changed readers. It concerns his quoting of “Rick Wilson, a Republican Party strategist and Trump critic.”

“Critic” isn’t the half of it, as a CNN profile makes clear. What it also spells out is that Wilson has “has informal ties to Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s networks”. In other words, two of the contenders Trump took to pieces in the primaries.

There is a good chance the Western Bulldogs will win this year’s AFL premiership, just as they did last year. Were McGeough a sports writer and applying the same standards he brings to US politics, we could expect him to quote a prominent football figure as guaranteeing that result without identifying his source as Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge.

As columnist Day notes in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald now sells just 93,000 copies on any given weekday, while the Age cannot manage even that pitiful tally, its Monday-to-Friday circulation now standing at 88,000 and dropping fast. They are shocking numbers, testaments to bad management and worse journalism.

If Fairfax intends to persist with its ink-and-paper editions, as the company recently said it will, one way to regain readers and their trust might be to insist that star correspondents actually do a little more in the way of research than re-writing the Washington Post and New York Times.

Roger Franklin, a former Fairfax correspondent in the US, is the editor of Quadrant Online

Comments [7]

It is worthy of note that what these “mental health professionals” did concerning Donald Trump constitutes a misdemeanour. It is illegal in the US for a psychiatrist to publicly diagnose anyone without having personally examined the subject and without the explicit permission of that subject to publicise the diagnosis. One wonders if McGeough, an expert in US affairs, is aware of this “inconvenient” fact but finds it counterproductive to his narrative.